Arjai Hynes - Gemini Spirit
"My, my, aren't you a long way from home," the pilot said under her breath. "What in the name of Elvis brought a Federation cargo hauler all the way out here?" Arjai Hynes liked to call herself a treasure hunter. It sounded more romantic than scavenger. Jumping from system to system, searching for wrecked vessels with useful items to salvage wasn't glamorous and was frequently mind-numbingly dull, but if you did your research well and had good instincts, you could keep your ship flying and your life support cycling, if only barely. Of course, it helped if you knew enough about engineering to do most of the ship's maintenance yourself, especially if the ship happened to be an ancient Tarsus II tramp Freighter that seemed held together by duct tape and bailing wire. The dead hulk of the cargo hauler drifted in the void, not merely far from any Federation trade route, but far from the Federation, period. Too big for slipstream travel and too far for warp drive, that left jump gates and wormholes as the only reasonable answers for how it got here...neither of which existed in this system or anywhere near it. Besides, Federation ships didn't bother with jump gates, warp engines being their preferred mode of travel. So what was it doing here? Aside from that, where was its cargo module? Zooming in her scanner on the saucer section of the vessel, she saw the name, "USS Gemini." Pressing a key on her comm panel, she hailed, "Free Trader Sato to USS Gemini, Come in Gemini." Silence. Several more attempts to contact the hauler had the same result. While her ship had no scanners for detecting life signs, she could read energy signatures, and while the Gemini wasn't technically dead in space, its readings were far below what they should have been. Something was definitely wrong. After a cautious approach in which she matched the Gemini's slow rotation, she took the Sato on a slow orbit around the apparent derelict. The gaping wound in her starboard side was close to 15 meters long by her estimate and centered on engineering, which was open to space. She wasn't reading enough energy output for there to be a force field in place to retain atmosphere, so at least that part of the ship was in hard vacuum. The skin of the vessel was torn outward, indicating the damage originated inside the ship. So this wasn't the result of an attack. "Well," she mused, "at least I probably don't have to worry about pirates." Thirty minutes later, she mag-locked the boots of her vacc suit to the hauler's main engineering deck, or more accurately, what was left of it. The damage was staggering; short of a warp core breach - which would have vaporized the vessel - this was about as bad as it got. Torn and twisted metal was everywhere, though thankfully, no floating debris. That must have been blown out with the hull breach, along with any unlucky crew-members that had been in the section when whatever accident befell the ship happened. Finding an emergency airlock to the next section, she was relieved to find the rest of the ship wasn't also in vacuum. However, she was glad she had decided not to remove her helmet when she discovered the rest of the vessel had an entirely different kind of devastation. Compartment after compartment, red smears of blood, flesh, and shattered, splintered bone could be found plastered against the bulkheads. The ship didn't simply lose gravity; whatever happened in Engineering must have damaged the inertial dampeners, instantly hurling everything - and everyone - not well-secured sideways with a staggering amount of angular momentum; they were all dead in an instant. She fought the urge to vomit in her helmet as she realized she'd find no survivors on board. No survivors. The import of that simple statement suddenly reached the forefront of her consciousness. She was on a derelict ship...a derelict *Federation* ship. Wrecked engineering section or not, she couldn't imagine the salvage value of such a find. Almost as suddenly, she felt disgusted by the fact that she thought of that so quickly. Of course, there was the issue of what could actually be salvaged. The ship itself was a long way from anyplace it could be reasonably towed. Furthermore, there was a lot more than flesh and bone destroyed when the inertial dampeners failed. That was a problem for later. For now, there was the mystery of what this ship was doing here in the first place? There was no warp core disaster she was aware of that would fling a ship hundreds of light years away from anywhere it belonged. Maybe the captain's logs would shed some light. With that thought, she walked to the dead turbolift, pried open the doors, clicked off her mag boots and propelled herself up the shaft toward the bridge. --- It took Arjai close to an hour to get emergency power up in the bridge so she could play the logs. She brought up low gravity, emergency lighting, and sensors as well, just to make things a little easier, and to be able keep an eye out in the general vicinity if she had any visitors. It wouldn't last more than a few hours, but that would be enough. She was wrong about one thing; there were reasons why a warp-capable Federation ship would use a jump gate, reason 1 being if their warp drives were offline and they wanted to get where they needed to be while their engineers affected repairs. Once in hyperspace, they could reach their destination in a reasonable time using their impulse engines. It made perfect sense, and 99.999% of the time, they'd have no problem as long as they stayed on beacon and maintained the lock-on connection... "Captain's Log, Stardate 2515.11.17: The hyperspace beacon lock is lost. The beacon tracking modules weren't updated along with our Astrogation upgrades last month. Chief Vance says the incompatibility caused a small "drift" in our connection to the tachyon beam. The Astrogation computer was able to compensate initially; by the time lock finally went down, we were so far off beacon we couldn't find the signal again. We're hopelessly lost in hyperspace." Arjai's head tilted to one side, confusion wrinkling her brow. Traveling off-beacon would explain them being far away from any system Federation ships would frequent, but how did they get out of hyperspace? She started the last entry. "Captain's log, Stardate 2515.12.20: Chief Vance has the warp drive back online. It's taken weeks, but she's finished the reconfiguration. hopefully, instead of creating a warp bubble, we'll be able to make an exit jump point. She's set the core to auto-eject if any of a hundred things go wrong. The chances of this working are slim, but getting our atoms scattered across the universe is better than being lost in here until we lose our minds. May Fate smile upon us." "Or not," Arjai thought to herself as she clicked the log off. Desperation led the Captain and crew of the Gemini to take a high-risk gamble, and they lost. Obviously the core ejected as planned, but whatever the ship's engineer tried to do with the warp engines to create a jump point failed catastrophically. That mystery solved, there was nothing left to do but see what she could salvage initially, then work out how to get a dead starship a dozen light-years to the nearest inhabited system. Stepping into the now-functioning turbolift, Arjai went to the hangar bay. The cargo module had been sheared off, presumably thanks to the same inertial dampener failure that turned the crew into meat smears on the bulkheads. The mass in the hold must have far exceeded the specifications of the docking clamps. but there were a number of pallets in the hangar bay that were well-secured and undamaged, including several of medical supplies. All by themselves, they'd make this trip profitable; anything else would be a bonus. Then, mag-locked to the hangar deck without a scratch on her, was the mother lode: a Type 9C Cargo Shuttle, warp-capable, armed and shielded. And new...well, a lot newer than the Sato, anyway. It wasn't designed for long-haul use - it had no living quarters or sanitary facilities - then again, when a ship can cruise at warp 4, "long haul" has a whole different meaning than it does on one that needs jump gates and slipstreams. There was still the problem of transport, but maybe the shuttle had a tractor beam. If it did, she could use it to tow the Sato under warp. She giggled at the thought: The "wreck" towing the tow truck. She was at the shuttle's console when she felt the Gemini shudder slightly. A derelict ship that was essentially dead in space shouldn't shudder. Glancing quickly over the comm panel, she patched the shuttle into the ship's sensor array. Fore, aft, and port were clear. But on the starboard side there were three bogeys inbound... and no tramp freighter at station-keeping 50 meters out from the long gash in the engineering section. In its place was a rapidly expanding cloud of twisted metal debris. Arjai's heart caught in her throat as the three inbound vessels were identified as Orion slavers. She needed to get out, and quickly. Eyes flicking over the controls, she punched the shuttle's power-up sequence, overriding the safety checks. As the impulse engines came online, she released the mag-locks and signaled the hangar bay doors to open. A warning chime sounded; the slavers had detected the energy spike of the drives powering up, and were locking on the Gemini, whether for weapons or boarding, she couldn't tell. Suddenly, she remembered something. Her fingers flew over another panel, and a shimmering light shone behind her as the shuttle's cargo transporter beamed the pallets of medical supplies aboard. An indicator lit up green as the hangar doors reached minimum clearance, and Arjai's fists slammed down simultaneously on the panel's "FULL IMPULSE" and "SHIELDS" controls. An instant later, a half-materialized Orion boarding party was vaporized by the impulse drive wake as the shuttle shot out of the hangar bay at nearly 7500 kilometers per second. By the time the slaver ships had figured out what happened, Arjai had already come out of a five-second microwarp, made a vector change perpendicular to the ecliptic, and gone back into warp again, making any attempt at pursuit a waste of effort. Laying in a course to the nearest jump gate, she decided her best bet was filing her salvage claim at the Babylon 5 station. The Federation might dispute that the shuttle and its cargo was legitimate salvage, but their repeated assertions that Starfleet was a scientific and exploration agency, not military, would make it harder for them to claim "State Secrets" before an independent tribunal. At the very least, a claim filed at B5 should prevent them from impounding the shuttle and tying her up in light-years of red tape. If they wanted it badly enough, they'd have to make a fair offer of compensation. That being handled, It was time to figure out a new way of making a living. Her destroyed freighter may have been an ancient near-wreck, but it was a home as much as a ship. The shuttle, though faster and far newer, simply wasn't designed for the same kind of life. Arjai needed short haul work, nothing more than a handful of light-years apart. That would be fine, but if the Federation decided to come after her - B5 salvage filing or not - that could be risky. "Slipstream trips could work," she thought to herself, "I just need to find a slipknot as a base." Working through the astrogation charts on the shuttle, she circled one such slipstream nexus: Dokk Refurinn in the Cygnus Sector of the Magellanic Clouds. "That could work nicely..." In the Babylon 5 small craft docking bay, Arjai admired the new inscription on the cargo shuttle's hull. Maybe naming her new ride, "Gemini Spirit," was only a tiny tribute to the Starfleet crew that lost their lives trying to escape being lost in hyperspace, but it was the best she could do. As she cleared the shuttle's cargo ramp, she said, "Close hatch, power up." The shuttle obeyed, and the low whine of the impulse engines coming up sang in her ears. Settling into the pilot's couch, she let out a breath and said to herself, "Time for the next chapter." Pushing the thruster controls forward, the Gemini Spirit eased out of Babylon Station. Moments later, the Jump Gate shimmered a reddish orange, and the tiny shuttle leaped out into the stars.